Man Among the Living

The moon shines happy in my bedroom window, growing bigger. It rained earlier and a little bit the last few days, so the air is mulchy and cool. A whole new July world has presented itself, sweatshirts without sunglasses and puddles in the dirt. I'm listening to a friend's sister's CD (actually in my iPhone so my statement is anachronistic)...not sure whether to go to bed or crawl out into the wet sage and talk to the rabbits. I'm busy, as they say, but it's so sweet and cool and my eyes don't hurt anymore. The smoke has been composted into the clay and maybe it'll bring new vegetables. A tough start to a summer, the toughest I've ever been part of...but a few days of afternoon clouds and the smell of raisin rain and it's all erased. This is the most hospitable place on earth, after the volcanoes spewed and the land upheaved...if you lived through that you're in the right place. My house is cool and I'll be able to sleep with a smiley face...I felt the smile at 4:43am last night when I rolled over to drink water and caught a draft from the dormer window. I reveled with the stink bugs, lizards and spiders strutting through my room with no issues. We all smiled into the big windows showing the blinking stars and listening to the quiet coyotes waiting until tomorrow for forage. I hear crying babies and slow cars with cigarette red lights spinning crazed into the Mesa for hot springs and campsites and people waiting for days. And I know to tell the soft nothingness here that I'm still around to witness and feel this in my gnarled feet. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing and nowhere else I'd rather be. Sad, yes, but with the taste of the Rio Grande in my teeth, and the sense that the thunderstorms love us and will give us what we need, man among the living.

Chilly Last of Spring

I love this - it is June 20th and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a slight shiver and purple hew to my lips and fingers. The clouds are low and it is raining in the mountains. We have not had rain since May 26th. It won't be much, maybe a few stray drops, but it feels good, smells like the coast. My black hoodie is bunched over my striped green, breezy, summery button down shirt. I have Jeans on my legs, and socks on my feet - rarities the past 4 weeks. Birds are singing, some swooning. They seem to like the cool and brooding. And my cell phone is ringing on my hip, not the sound of birds.

Back for the Eclipse with Pain

It's been so long my friend. A gentle dusk on the desert on a day of full moon lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. The smoke from wildfires has dissipated leaving a peach clarity to the horizon, lifting up from darkness the pinons on the dinosaur mounds and cat back ridges. I can see into the bottoms of arroyos and catch black birds leaving branches on the escarpments. There is emptiness in my mouth where 4 hours ago a molar once rooted. With a hole in its hull that would have sunk it (and me), it now sits on my altar, a specter of the past, a notch of lived life, a symbol of mutation. It hurts in the bone above the hole and radiates with my heartbeat out toward my right ear. I let it hurt, waiting for the aspirin I'll take closer to my sleep. The full moon awaits out there, behind the Pueblo and it will light up my bedroom in the wee hours. I am tired and know I must sleep on my back. There is writing fluttering in my left ear, and stuffing my lungs. It longs for glistening green spinach and creamy pesto, mason jars of cooled Mate and bags of mixed nuts and berries. It stays quiet, mostly, not in apathy or timidity, but in wait, in breathing, in a slower beat, a half closed eye, a smoothed out foot. It is cocked, not loaded, a ghost limb limbering, a fastball not yet thrown. And it does not matter when the throw is made. We're at a tipping point - me and me, and you and you. I move about wondering less about the games going on about me, out there, in the crackling morning radio, in the faces of people stuck in traffic on the one road connecting dots on the vast high desert. There is still, though, outside of politics, partying, and my skin wanting to be touched, a hunt for security and a fleeing from some force, some hunger that smells metallic and sounds like an army of cicadas. I'm forgetting my face in the mirror, dropping more crumbs in my car, talking less and giving up more. And yet there is a bubble growing inside me that smells of spring laundry, and feels like sitting on a bench and just looking, and looking until I fall asleep without the fear of being slapped in the head. My face hurts where my tooth used to be and it's now dark in my house. Pain sounds like a conversation with myself, feels like rowing a boat in thick water. I think of money and fresh vegetables, and finding my soul in the hole left by a broken tooth.

Dusk Beyond Measure

Spectral, the clouds spinning wraiths/
Sea creatures/
bottom feeders/
knots in the wood of clouds/
4 directions of immensity/
wind in curls/
clouds in curves/
the desert floats in the universe/
mountains kissed by lavender dragonfly wings/
soft clay underfoot/
humps of snow/
roads weakened by sun/
a blue over layers of cloud, silk lit, smoothed, singing blue/
a dog barks toward the mouth of the Rio Grande Valley/
the pregnant woman sleeps in the wind/
Two Peaks puckers/
a diesel truck chugs slowly in the mud/
no voices/
the sage jiggles/
Radiohead plays in my house behind tall windows of watery glass set into mud walls/
I am ringed by mountains, let out of the house to make love to these trembling layers of life/
I know you, I know you/
that lone tree on the wasted hill in Scotland, barren black rocks where sound is carried by the wind/
it is windy and getting colder/
the river is jade and frothy, blond grasses are exposed early while the snow piles deeper in the mountains/
nobody braves the mud at the road's terminus/
deep ruts and a struggling car/
rock-to-rock with lime green lichens/

This past week on Devisadero, I smelled the sugary sap in the pinons, and the dark dirt beneath the snow. And yesterday, the ocean filled the air, brine, a softness around the sting. It's okay, it's okay. The fiddler is making her way. It's different than last year. I know her and she will teach me. I hear laments from the desert, but the snow isn't as deep, the melting not as dramatic. I don't think the roofs are leaking. I don't know if we need a band?

Stopped on the Terminal Road

A scarlet rouge glow at the edges of indigo smudged by finger circles of grape, a vibrant liquid sky skirted low by india ink molds of sleeping braves and pregnant women, nautilus ears and cat backs. I stopped at the top of a hill on the dirt road unable to understand my place in this. My windows were down, rapidly chilling air seeping in, but no sounds. Lights in kitchens glowing out into the sage from houses marooned like ships on the old sea bottom. No cars behind me, I felt my toes constricted in my boots and longed to be naked, to have tough enough feet to leave my boots and my car behind, to breathe out into the desert and find the canyon rim and follow it north to the river's source. A flood of dinosaur memories made me see myself low to the ground, my back arched to take weight off my hands. That smell of clay under a sky I can describe only as modern, more modern than technology, a screen for the movie of old stories absorbing into that blue, that butane cupping the long crescent moon, everything that has crept through this valley from Creede down to Mexico; big cats and mammoths, wolves and mastodons, hunters and rabbits. Down to Guatemala, up to Alaska, bright moons to guide and light the dark pumice rock. And I sat, paralyzed, looking west wondering about the water, feeling wrung, but knowing from the smell of sage that I could walk, just walk, no sweater or hat or coat with a hood - just me in my skin with my own fire and an internal compass to send me north.

Summer City

Creamed coffee in a small honey jar,
the label still showing the beekeeper
bending gently among the swarms and
honeycombs
Two Ravens talking to a magpie
high in a cottonwood pale green
leaves jiggling among them like
regalia against a powder blue
late summer sky
The Magpie warbles like an infant
reminding me of beaches with
gray wet sand and bubbles
terrycloth bathing suits with
blue and white stripes
A tan father, unafraid of the deeps,
smelling of Coppertone #4
and almond sweat
Little sandpipers skittering along
the surf and big bosomed aunts
in magenta and purple bikinis
strolling like marchers with
elbows flung out for each step
Metallic skyscrapers in the last
sun of summer, looming over
the river, the silvered lattice
girders of the 59th Street Bridge
Sand falling out of hair and tickling
crotch, we hurtle into Manhattan,
a beachy, moppy haired family of
browns, sitting quietly hungry for
Italian food
The City is quiet, the train tracks empty,
the streets softer than I remember
hot dogs tingle the air, knishes
with mustard, soft pretzels smiling
in the steam.
Movie theaters hawk the titles of the early 70s
sad men on billboards in cowboy hats
Chinese men smiling, on black bicycles,
dark flattened gum on the sidewalks.
And still the ocean echoes in my ears
like a conch shell, the tide of me
moving in and out,
Nobody talking, and for once,
that is ok, that is what the beach
and Manhattan do to us.
My mother sees a friend on 32nd street
it seems odd, breaks the spell, but
as the two ladies, both dressed in saffron sundresses,
converse, faces close, I cling to my father's hip
and smell the day, my life.

Sunday Morning Ball

A spearminty Sunday early morning. I awake with sad songs on the clock radio and a bounce in the air. I am torn up bodily by softball dives and slides on gravelly ground and apply salve and apply bandages to the most tender places. I am hungry and ready to run and swing and whoop, and maybe win a championship, maybe not. There will be a cookout in the high sun of late morning, the celebration of a season with a new group of guys, guys I've come to like, goofy and competitive, fiery and fiesty and ready to laugh at themselves. They love music and the cousinhood of jam shows, which reveals itself in the dugout and in encouragement on the field. I am not juiced enough with sleep, but I'm rested and ready to breathe the cool, squint into the blue gold sun, win a game in the morning, eat some grilled food, and then figure things out, maybe walk up high again, maybe just read, maybe just write, maybe just trace the big circle.

Hiding on the Desert

I find myself on a dirt hill filled with burred desert weeds that scratch and tickle, looking to a mellow gold sun splattering light against a wide arc of thin clouds going vaguely lavender. High summer has the desert on a day with no storms, the softening of evening massaging my exposed skin, an invitation to sit and sip at lemonade, talk softly in the wind, keep eyes on the west as the sun melts into the low volcanoes. It is now, in this ease and spent, that I don't know anything, or anyone. The fast running thoughts of days are done, and I see pictures of things that spoke, heavy raindrops plunking leaves in a cool charcoal sodium light after a hailstorm and a dharma talk about freedom, of slipping out an upstairs window in the dark and floating among the oak trees in my childhood backyard, of walking tall in the dark talus under the pyramids of the high peaks surrounded by echoes of old times in other lives, of Liverpool streets wet and shining in a sliver of white sun before dusk and the feel of a tight blue suit and black leather boots. And I'm queasy from big bites of untouchable sun and drunk from too much motion and the gulf between me and community. Hiding on the desert, in the open in a low slung matchbox of pumice and coffee mud, silent on the green concrete floor, waiting for a knock, a ring, a calling voice, but shooing such notions away with a middle that flutters for fear of exposure, of reckoning, of spilling from its casing. What do we do with these lives? What is the promise in the wind that allows a breath so sweet and gives a caress so disarming that to die doesn't seem an ending but a float in a canoe on a calm lake? I'm asking questions and I don't need answers. I'm wading and when I walk outside and take in the desert with my eyes, the mountains in my groin, I lick the land and it seems small, moving from all directions to a single point. It is the saddest thing I've ever felt, the vastness, and the inverse. It comes on as love, cushioning and enlivening, telling me in whispers that it's already over, two seasons ahead, buried under snow. And I think maybe this is all I have to tell, sing-songy on the inside, wanting to cry, wanting to be devastated by beauty, to speak in a long language, loopy and hoarse with an endless acoustic guitar strumming in the background, laying everybody low. It is a song that I hear, that I feel, I tremble with it, and it has bits and pieces in it, fragments of blood and the call of the late night, which I know to be another call misinterpreted, a wild horn from the valley. I have walked (and run) with people and spirits, gaining streets and finding sunrises, looking and talking and telling truths that fade with the sea sickness of the day, and seem preposterous, or merely unreachable...until the summer evening, high desert wind, the heat turned to a lover with smooth, cool skin, skin to rub against, skin to dream on.

Breathing Notes of Summer

The moon is a walrus whisker tonight, but light enough to give its round bulk illumination. Clouds in the late dusk take on smokestack puffs and black billows against the ringing dark blue above. This day had a streak to it, and endless motion, a bicycle pedal in circles. It is ending with a chunk of chocolate, my reward for meeting myself in the parking lot outside the Magistrate Court, and shaking my hand, apologizing from my still heart for my barking and serrated words, my slip in the mud. It felt like a bubble, a floating piece of myself liberated, leaving the rest of me airy, spacious, ready to keep moving without muscle flexes or jaw clenches. This day had rhythm, bit, bat, bijat, dat, dat, dat-tat-tat, bijat. Symbols in the sounds of wings when I stopped at a red light near the rodeo grounds. Looked like a redtail hawk streaking off toward the wonder of deep grass between town and the ridge of Blueberry Hill. Maybe it's harder to see the prey with the grass so high? But I see the arcs up there, the seeing, the scouting. They see me when I'm up high, circling my arms, trying to summon notes from my belly to see what they are, let them see who I am, hear them, be them, and release them to the ravens to take to the other side. Today there were smiles. Today there were cute old people, a little hunched, carrying things, but squinting bemusedly in the sun. Today they had things, to sell, to trade, to show in rows on blankets. And it is summer tonight, the bugs, though, staying silent, not done with the smoke after dinner, the nap after sex, the sucking on the green stalks that may never taste like this again. A map says that this place is brown and rocky, rugged like Mongolia, and yet the grasses of shangri la sway with crickets that crawl up through your drains and greet you in the morning shower with a hop and lick of their limbs. They do this with alacrity, and unlikely calm, with a studied crook of the leg, a veteran's poise. Venerable are these grasshoppers, hard kneed and agile, but in a way that strikes of age, of sage days talking to spiders and yippity rabbits, wiggling centipedes and tittering young birds, bloody worms and prairie dogs. Tonight all is quiet, no cicadas or meadow larks, or even magpies with their sing-song derision. It is easy, easy, dark with no breeze, promise of 29 days of moon cycle, at the end of which all may be different, all may be transformed into the high praise of the corn days, the pale blue of the ocean sky a thousand miles west, the sting of salt from sweat in the eyes of a hiker nearing the peaks, beating a thunderstorm up the slope, smelling the end. Already? A season ahead we live, maybe two, and where will we be then? It is ok to be in the quiet, only 3 days into summer, nothing to hold onto, nothing to shed. I can always smell winter and the bones of large animals, but the stew can wait, and I look forward to sleep and that walking I do, out and out into the boundaries, floating along the prickled ground, searching for the notes I keep breathing out.

From Chocolate to Family to Children to Change: A writing practice

Because I don't want to, I am doing a writing practice. Right here, right now, or Write here, Write now! I must keep typing without stopping for 30 minutes. I can type slowly if I need to, but no corrections, no going back and deleting to be literary, hip, cool, smooth, smart, brilliant, rollicking, ballsy, irreverent, fearless, unfathomable, deep, and lustrous. Nope. And here I go, nowhere yet, not sure where to head. Writing practice, writing practice. An empty page (so to speak), and empty vessel. Hmmmmm, chocolate, 70% cacao, is in me, moving through, having passed the pleasure centers of the tongue, drifting choco smoke up into my sinuses and tingling my brain into a sense that I am both ok and wanting, into a slide, silky glide of my own milkiness, my own sense of slither, come hither, the nostrils flared for the soak of the sage outside, turning the desert to apples and mint. It is raining again, unexpected, but a fetch of clouds has swung low over the Mesa, dipping into the canyon above the river, threatening to unite with its kind down in the bottom, water to water, dust to dust, the insects hide in the rocks, waiting for the drips to clear the cups of the flowers that cannot stop opening wide, priapic, triumphant, Ella fucking Fitzgerald, A bald tenor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Raindrops keep Falling on my Head, it ain't gonna stop, the deluge, the monsoon, big words for muddy roads, but not like in the lower elevations, not tropical but cool, the water shining with a bit of dark blue, a bit of lead waiting for the last rays of the sun to poke through the suddenly lifted edge of the western skin of sky. It's rose fest of cacti, delectable, edible, put in your salad dark red lusciousness, and sexy magenta of a woman just coming of age, just knowing how to sway, to take in a look, and to brandish and lavish. Soft dirt and clay, turning to pudding, years in the waiting, the one time these shapes take hold and horses have a hard time treading the land. But leaden drops calm the hooves, and we play volleyball with bouncing bellies in the bottomlands under the slopes, next to rotting cars with grass peering in the empty windows, and lost dogs tongues waving, smiling, dripping with hunger, stand close to our rippling legs, a low growl, a high whine, and nothing to grasp. It smells so good and we don't care about the drops, the lightning stinging the black volcanoes, the thunder ruffling our thighs, making us want ribs, chicken legs, meats of some sort although we have only heaps of greens and berries, and beer. It is the time of high light and it won't leave us hanging, blueberry skies mixed with the aquamarine of lost-at-sea youth, a color that used to cause creeping sadness at the thought of dinner when in the woods with smudge faced friends figuring out how to eat snails, and light the woods on fire. And it stays with us, giving us a chance, after romance, after the toilet bowl has emptied, after the early dreams have been composted and reshuffled, after the old songs have finally lost their meaning. There is still a chance. We remember bits and slices of times with family, around tables, food spilling over, bickering in the kitchen, hugs in the den, puking in the bathrooms. It is sepia toned as we might expect, doesn't matter if now or in the sepia past, past is sepia, the color of the astral floor, the color of blended muteness, the corroboration of your brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cute cousins, and the strange revelations you knew as a kid, among the elders, hiding in guilelessness, but listening and knowing you've been witness to the Titanic, and the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series, and Man walking on the moon, and the terrible quicksand of the family legacy. Or maybe not quicksand, sometimes the blue-flame of life risen up in everybody, when remembering that their past is built on crenelated lives, hollowed from fullness, splinte3ed from their boughs, but they had heft, and they sprung, and spanked and spelunked through the caves for all of us. And we're doing that now. Me, on the desert, looking out at popping sage, so green it wants to be blue, battling my energies, trudging through late nights to get back to early mornings, feeling sadnesses born of my addicted cells, knowing that I can get back into the soft (yet firm) bed and arise christened new, bells bopping, words flying, breathing my bellybutton alive again. Seeing myself a child in the flower's faces. Seeing myself aloft in the cheeks of the people, pinched, reddish, like dolls, from the other night, tromping from place to place, desert to town, to houses filled with murals and the scent of sandalwood in the bathrooms, having fun, not ready to pay the price of tomorrow, never tomorrow, never tomorrow. And, hey, how did the dawn get away with the day....last night's always getting in my way - lyrics from a friend's song. Sometimes true. And yet dusk is hanging on through this clack, clack, and I hear the soft spilling of rain on my roof. Ravens, getting more plump with the bounty of wetness, shaking off the spatter, smiling and roiling around on the cliffs. People in tatters waqlking down the road, one-by-one, sometimes in gaggles, in groups, in trios, looking sad but found, blind and bobbling, but unboggled. Unimpeded, they keep moving toward the hot springs where they may find some warmth in the chilled rain. children of this earth, old time London backstreets urchins finding flowers to put in their hair,a nd to play drums to the weary, and wary, because they still have time, and time has them, and the world just may turn enough toward the sun that we'll all dry off with them. Music comes to me across the mesa, a sound of flutes and electric guitars, of fiddles and kettle drums, and the rain pounds harder now.

Storms and Roses

First the storms, then the blooms. I'm just out of a weeklong Zen meditation and writing retreat. It's part of an "intensive" that lasts for the full year. These were taken during the week either at/near my house on the high Mesa or on the Devisadero trail in the hills behind Taos. It has been rainy and cool since mid May often with stormy skies and fat, cold drops of rain. The rivers are running high and although the seemingly abundant snowpack melted off quickly (due, we're told, to a high dust content caused by the windstorms of early spring which settled in the snow and absorbed the heat of the sun, liquifying the snow), the above normal rains have made up for it. Apparently, the Rio Grande, which supplies water to Arizona and Texas under water rights transfer deals entered into in the 70s and 80s (boo), does not have to be curtailed (through opening and closing dams) this year to supply the full allotment. This is good news for irrigators/farmers along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (and acequias) in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico who will also get a full allotment. Since I've lived in the Taos Valley, we have had at least normal or above normal moisture (following 5 years of extrem drought), which feels sweet. Normal for this high desert ringed by 13,000' peaks, is 12 inches. Some years we've had close to 15". The Taos Ski Valley receives about 300" of snow in a normal year (with approximately 60-70" where I live at 7,091'). In contrast, New York City averages 42" of rain per year, South Florida around 65", Seattle approximately 40" (less than NYC, yes, but it drizzles more there), parts of the Oregon and Washington (and California) coasts, approximately 70". Somehow, it all works.

And can you believe the vivacity of these cactus flowers?! Crazy.

From Fight to Flight

I'm ready to fight today. I'm a confused wolverine baring my teeth. I speak calmly, but I'm tired, not a sleep deprived tired, a mutant's tired, the exhaustion from having left myself and returned to a desolate, foreign, too bright place. And the mutant wants out. Me mutant hears false provocations and cannot make camp. He is impatient and hopeless; he is worried that there is nothing, no reason, no purpose, just random emotions. And yet my mutant's ego is strong; it obliterates everything but the light of morning. If I can write this, I think, there is still some light at the bottom of the barrel and the mutation can be dissolved (transmuted?). I am sitting and I am writing. I am expanding in the face of popping balloons. I have been crowded out for a while, pushed to the edge of the bed. And even as I write this, I am still close to the edge, my heart beats too fast, my belly clenches enough to weaken my legs, and my ego is dug in, defiant, making love to the mutant. It refuses definition or the notion that practice, consistent practice, is good for me. It bristles at its machinations being called addiction. It says it's all a big conspiracy theory. It defends its turf. It says I can drink and trip and snort cocaine in the quest for experience. Who could deny that who is not a loser, a wussy, a prude, a killjoy? It carves out spaces for me and even, I think, it is looking out for me, being a matchmaker, keeping me from being the lean loner on the desert. It's also spending all my money and losing my possessions. And who is the one who is hopeless? Who is the one thinking it's too late, it's no use? Who is the one worried about dying? Is that the ego, too? Is that part of the trap? I hear myself saying "don't you want magic? Don't you want to be able to dive through your navel into nothingness?" You're addicted to ecstasy (not the drug) and you don't know it. You'd trade a 7 year process of transformation for a 3-day concert filled with ionized air and one dance with the dark skinned girl in the short denim skirt with the green eyes lit by the setting sun and your seduction - the dance where you lose yourself, that crystal-clinking tingling in your groin rising up your heated abdomen and reaching your eyes where you now know she knows and although you probably won't say anything or do anything, you know you could, in that place that feels like the high mountains above treeline and smells like pine sap and sulfur and lands you in a painting with her on the mossy edge of a dark lake under a soaring granite ledge, your warmth all in your skin, the touching and clinging and clawed ass grabbing; it's a dream, the same dream it's always been. And she's there with you (you think, but does it matter?), this person you see at the three-day concert, between angled red rocks, 100 yards above the stage at the birthing of this gap, with the band in a runaway trance of twisting base and waving guitar, drumbeats picking out individual ribs, surrounded by 10,000 bobbing heads with open mouths, and, closer, by old friends and concert buddies swaying through their own fields of understanding, looking like family, reaching out for you both when they think you're lost, knowing it, too, and not judging but still pulling you back from the high mountain lake where you'll always make love, to make sure you don't because that girl's boyfriend is coming back from the beer stand. And as you come back, before you smile at each other like Adam and Eve, before the clank of the sound comes back as if someone opened the hatch of an airplane, you swim with her in that lake and you know you've known something larger, something you might remember on your deathbed. And then the boyfriend's there; he's new to the scene and he gives you his beer to sip. He's tripping, too, gleamy and amazed, a joyous stretch of flesh and bone, a jumping bean of kindness, and although the music is now loud and your ears have popped and you feel your bare feet sticking to the beer soaked blue tarp, you are in love, not with the girl, or the boyfriend, but with the organism, the whole undulating mass of people, the bats above against the indigo sky, the holy red hulks of rock pointing west, the blue lit city of Denver like Oz 30 miles northeast, and your round-eyed friends passing you a bag of Molly grabbing the meat of your shoulder, slapping your palms - you have made it here, you have made it, you are part of the organism and it loves itself into one piece, and you are nothing but the current that runs through it. Do you understand that place? Is it worth the week it takes to settle back into your body and function in time? Tell me.

6 Days

The past 6 days have been spent with friends, nearby, far away, some new, some old family, some grounding and being grounded. Kid energy, emergent, smooth, an inhabiting of self beginning to occur. There was a pinch of worry and a dollop of woe, a cleaving of the center, a heaving before the ocean went warm and glassy, a snorting from the top before the belly rounded. Some vanity before that storm faded east and left a scrubbed knowing like the desert becoming itself again after the wind. The field of possibility extended in good food, abundance rubbing off on me in loaves of bread, sun-dried tomato paste, an Italian accent full of bounce and circles, stinging grappa and lemon tart, a clean floor and emptied sink, the closed-eyed laughter of a sexy elf watching irises nod in a hail storm. There was a long hike in the rain down in the bottom of the gorge where the river overflowed into the hot spring pools, but not with menace, and not enough to deter two magic tadpoles with freckled legs who talk to faeries and nature divas and remember the river as a bubbling brother. Paintings of mallet-breasted women mixed with the spring and stir of basketball and the popeyed swirl of good whiskey. In the looking back, there is a whole circle. Mixed, mixed, mate and some coffee, deep, bitter greens and plum extract, lean red meat topped with silky mozzarella and long fried onions flecked with torn basil leaves, grilled zuchini and cob corn popping on your canines, slow swallows of quiet water at room temperature then a margarita soothed with a woven basket full of fresh limes. To bed before 11pm after a day of swimming and pine nut tea, the eyes of the children, green and indigo streaked with dusk sky and old tears, dotted around the irises with the points of sundials. 6 days is a long journey, to the peak of Chomolungma and the jungles of Laos, from my Lost China Sea filled with collapsing waves, to the cool, grassy valley of late spring where my masks are off, my clothing optional, my journey ended, again, where it always begins.

Time and Timelessness

A raven said to me, "Don't forget this hiking is your meditation. Some people need to move to be still." Then he asked me, "What anchors you to time?" And I thought, "Shame brings me back to time; to guilt; to will in a degrading attempt to prevent dissipation." To create requires timelessness. To love requires space, a suspension of self-awareness. I am now tired, sleepy, but I know these things. The fear of wasting time, by definition, disappears in the open field. Without time, there is no measure, no comparison. It is never too late. You can throw your arms around the people you miss, you can ask why and what and listen. The veil lifts, the barrier melts, the pathology becomes meaningless. You can write with your wrinkles and sound like youth because there is no measure. Presence is the sound of youth to us who are anchored in time, when really it is the naked sound, unembellished, unselfconscious, unaware of anything but the muscularity and breeze of it. Those words like walking in the mountains, watching moist dust settle among desert volcanoes, seeing the mossy underbelly of the foothills in a silver-plated light thrown from somewhere behind a sprawling thunderhead. There is no time in that view, the bounce of feet on the rocks, the stray drops grazing a cheek. And then a bolt of lightning over Two Peaks sparks the thought, "maybe if I get hit it'll knock me out of time forever and my eyes will blaze with an indescribable fire." And then the next thought, "But will it hurt?"

Ordinary Man

I'm in my cave like office, cool while the sun beats down through the leafing trees outside. Spring has come with layers of fragrance, lilacs and apple trees, dogwoods and astors, cherry trees and weeping willows in full blossom. Where there were scars in the peeling back of the snow in February and March, there is now cushy, dewy, color-mad life. It draws me out, the perfume, the skin caressing warmth, the thickening grasses. Yesterday, on Devisadero, the shoulders of the mountains gave blue-green healing to my computer-scattered eyes. An endless Moroccan blue sky, no clouds for a hundred miles in every direction, that green against blue like food, enabling deep breaths and nourishment. I expected people up there, but they must have hidden or I may have disappeared from view, vaporizing into the rocks I used as springs, miniaturizing into the insect on the dancing astors, their central yellow suns roundbellied. There in the shadows of khaki rocks the new flowers waved out of moss. Scrub oaks started to unfurl their little leaves, rubbery like any newborn, warm to the touch. Up on the ridge, the leaves were slower, still balled, waiting for a mild night. But the wildflowers were ready, waving, jumping, jiggling, so happy to be in the world that they'd give it all now, not worry about the future. I did pass one human, and she was a flower, too, a wide-jawed blond lady in reverie, off to the side of the trail in prayer, stretching her body skyward, making a giant circle of life with her arms, looking like I do on my altar rock. I was singing to myself, a song about an ordinary man, and I lowered my voice, but I did not stop as she was ok with it, two people in prayer, on a mountain, looking at the blue, listening to the birds. And the ravens played, rascally, riding backward in the wind, beaks facing west, gliding east, cigars in their mouths. They made me laugh and they knew it. I wondered about the fiddler, wondered if she wondered about me. I saw a fiddler weeks ago, snow still melting off the rocks, a woman I'd met before, but not the fiddler in green. She may be my teacher. The fiddler I'd followed and seen out on the trail and near the river is not my teacher, though I have things to learn. She is a lover and to know her I'll need to know how to play. The song I was singing yesterday had no fiddle. It was voice and guitar. My voice felt supple and rangy. It's a sad song, a reflective longing, a cautionary tale. "Just the son of an ordinary man/living his life in a gentle rage/living day by day by day/this is who he was meant to be/like taking water from a grain of sand/seeking sin in a pious age/wanting more but can't find a way/to disregard his destiny." It's 4:09 and I may have to leave the cave again. I have levitating to do. There are dinner parties and margaritas, women in sheer spring dresses dancing to ragtag blues looking for a shoulder to lean on. It is the time of the big wakeup. It is a hard time to stay on the trail, but that's where the magic is.

A Call to Pushups - The Battle

I'm running hard, running like a clueless bull. I didn't think I'd be back here again, but here I am. It's 7:30 and I'm doing pushups every couple of minutes to drain the excess energy. I'm hungry although I just ate. I want to go to town and watch sports while sipping beers and then go outside and marvel at the mild night. I want to go to parties, insert myself into scenes. I want to drink coffee and pace, pump my legs up and down, scratch some shit into notebooks, phrases, words, things I should be doing. It's all pushing the dream away. Where is the late night cafe (one thing we're surely missing in Taos)? Where are friends to talk in circles with (they're out there, but I'm gunshy, wanting solitude as much companionship, a strange, tearing dilemma). Why did I not know about the vision quests at the Lama Foundation this past weekend? Why does everything feel so difficult? Why have a drifted from my writing intensive commitments? My teacher? This is the turning point. How do I keep or regain the discipline in spring and summer? How? How do I not berate myself and turn myself into an enemy? Who are or where are my companions in sweet discipline? I know it can be sweet. I've tasted it. 5 or 6 weeks of straying from the core and my nerves are playing the old jangled song. I'm capable of great expressions of exuberance, of profligate wastes of time and money and life force. That's what I need to remember. The commitment of life force to the need, the addiction, the capitalist/consumptive cells. They don't need that much, but they have fallen back upon asking. I am not going to give it. And yet I do not want to be a dictator to my soul. No. No. There is a middle road. Pushups, situps, running, climbing, biking...and then I can sit, and write and read (160 pages since mid yesterday...so not too bad). Yes, tucked back in, everything expanding, taking artistic chances, opening wide to people. That's what I know. That's exciting and calming. I'm getting those calls again from the vampires. They disappeared because I disappeared. But you reappear and your blood still tastes sweet. This isn't easy. This is confusing. I don't want this to be epic. I'm dramatic, but, man, if you could look at me pacing my house, dropping down to do pushups, opening and closing cabinets, circling, checking the computer, picking pennies off the floor, unloading the car. I have more energy than 10 men, and more exhaustion, too. I want to get off wanting. I look forward to again being sated, open, alert, understanding, empathetic, gleam-eyed, and slow. It won't take long. It's just underneath this buzzing. But the buzzing is hard to tune out. This has helped. I don't know if I'll publish it. It's rambling. It's jibberish and gobbledegook. It's real, though. I'm in a challenge. I want to be able to do whatever I want and at the same time I want discipline and ease of heart. When those things match, which they did there for a while during sweet winter, I am in the open field. Time disappears. Now becomes enough.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest III: The Law of Least Effort

"Your walk isn't the same as it was in the winter."

I hadn't seen Harris in a few weeks. I'd been traveling and biking, doing other things. He was sitting on the rock throne at the top of Devisadero.

"Whaddya mean?"

He paused for a minute, looking at the ground then up at me.

"You know."

"Dude, you act like you know me. I've seen you a few times on this trail and you live in a cave. You don't know me. I don't have to deal with this. I'm on a hike. I'm on my own. I don't know you; you don't know me."

Truth is I was glad to see him. No more than 10 minutes earlier I was craving human connection; thinking I was becoming too much of a loner. I could feel it in my stomach, no different than a deep hunger for food, but without the gurgling. I was also hungry for food. In fact, I was all hunger, seeking, needing and feeling sad at the emptiness, an abandonment. But I hadn't been abandoned and I'd eaten plenty.

Harris stayed quiet and neutral, letting my little storm pass.

"You're an athlete now, not a traveler."

"What?"

"You're powering up the mountain like you're in a race."

"I'm no faster than I was in February."

"It's not about your relative speed, it's about the lean of your body and where your eyes are. You're not seeing as much."

"And you saw this in my last 10 strides as I approached you here?"

"No, me and Great Wing have watched you coming up the front side the last couple of times. He knows you know he was showing off last week when he made the big circle around you using his wings as ailerons to hold steady in that gale. No wing flaps at all, right?"

"Yeah, I remember. Pretty amazing. He came within 4 or 5 feet of me and I could hear the wind against his wings."

"You may not know it, but you have a few friends up here. Great Wing happens to think you're alright. He's noticed that you're walking like you did the winter before last, all swinging arms, stomp-footed and mouth breathing. I wasn't here, but he told me."

"He told you. Cmon, Harris. I believe in a lot of things, but how can a bird tell you something."

"Keep coming here and raise your head up and you'll probably figure it out."

Like all my conversations with Harris, I half wanted to smack the guy and at the same time I knew what he was telling me was true and I knew I needed to hear it. It was always like a dream up there when he showed up. It didn't make sense. He didn't make sense...but he did.

"He did come really close to me that day and I thought I heard something, not a voice, but something that had meaning in it."

"The ravens on this mountain have a lot of ways to communicate."

"Seems like it."

Harris nodded and for the first time I noticed he had a green backpack on.

"That pack new?," I asked.

"A guy left it up here last week."

"And you took it? What if he comes back looking for it?"

"Then it'll be there for him exactly where he thinks it will be."

"Like my sunglasses?"

He smiled with his eyes cast down."

"I have to go find Mutton. I'll see you again."

I had no idea who or what Mutton was, but in the couple of times I'd run into Harris the encounters ended this way each time with the phrase "I'll see you again." Not "I'll see you soon" or "I'll see you around" but "I'll see you again." There was a certainty in it and there wasn't anything to say back so I nodded and knew it to be true.

On the way back down, I stopped to hug my brother tree. I stood in the soft dark dirt and leaned my third eye into the skinny branch that sticks out. With my arms around his trunk, I asked my brother for guidance. He made no sounds this day, no creaks or groans. But before I pulled back a memory floated up. I was in my car driving from Boulder to Taos a few years ago and Deepak Chopra played on the CD player. He was talking about the law of least effort. And then I saw the vision of Great Wing hovering in the wind, letting it take him, not moving his wings but for a subtle side-to-side adjustment, and then after floating above me for a minute, letting the wind propel him into a great arc out over the cliffs. He rode the wind. And it hit me that the phrase I thought of that day with Great Wing over me was "law of least effort."

I let go of brother tree and jangled down the trail, a little hungry still, but nothing that couldn't keep.

I Went Down to the River...

I went to the river, rode down the ruts, curving through the sage and juniper hills remembering where I was and who I am. A purple dust storm spread its churn just below the sun and just behind the walking volcanoes like a ruffling curtain. Aquamarine sky, the peaks quiet and far away, snow spilling from the tops but starting to peel back, retreat, and I standing on a jutting talis rock letting the wind blow through me and realizing that spring had come, and when it had I was not looking. There were snows in March and April, four storms after March 21st, and there may yet be another, but I was whirling out there, traveling, surging, forgetting, leaving my mesa home in the dust. I stopped paying attention and became again the man who walks with Mr. Frodo, searching for a way to Mt. Doom to destroy that fucking ring. My gaze fell in upon my feet and no longer out the window following the moon and the ocean sky, no longer keeping watch for the fiddler in green. I stopped seeing rabbits except in the road darting across or frozen on the side, afraid to move. The dogs were gone, I was gone. My writing room was virtually emptied and abandoned for an office in town. Coffee crept back into the routine, joining the mate, and bars again seemed the natural follow to a power hike driven more now by the need to clear the computer glare out of my eyes and the fear of losing my leanness than to visit the ravens, my brother tree and absorb the magic at the confluence of the worlds. The house got dusty and the cupboard bare, but for mustard, an old yogurt and some rice pasta. I came home to a stopped up bathroom sink and an ashy wood stove flanked by piles of old newspaper and food packaging. It occurred to me that in the mornings the house was now colder, much colder, than it had been when I inhabited it nearly full time in December, January, February into early March. This owed as much to the higher angle of the sun as it did to the draft of my absense and the lack of fires before bed and early in the morning. It became harder to write at home (as you can see by the dwindling entries the past couple of months), the big wood table almost naked, the battered laptop sitting there with its screen hanging by one hinge. It was good enough to check sports scores and my email in the morning, but not inviting to create or even spew. "Where did my muse go?" I'd say to myself on the few nights I was here before dusk or darkness. And now I hear her saying back, "Where did you go, motherfucker?" And, of course, we both know. I went exit stage left to the office and the town draws, like an allergy, like an old itch that you forgot about for a while that you have a cure for at the bottom of some plastic bin under the sink in the bathroom. Six months gone from it and yet the same people were out there, Sam and Marky and AJ, Glenny and Fast Angie and Clyde, Alyson and Candy and Janet. Like family, they'll always be there to take you in. It's like you never left. And there's some solace in it, you know, but a month with that family and it's time to hit the road again, back home. I don't know. Again, I don't know. What I do know is that I was out there in March, sitting in the melting snow, watching it swirl around me, smelling spring in the caliche. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to see and feel the turn, but I missed it. At the river tonight, birdsong filled the gorge and the wind had no bite. It blew hard from the west but it caressed and bathed instead of cutting. Winter was gone and with it the snow that had lasted since November. Even the gullies were going green. I had some hugs out there in town, some moments of knowing the love in all the noise, the sass in the world, the altered, rednosed workshop of smudged saints, but I can't stay there. My workshop is here and my work requires everything I have. "Don't be dramatic" the muse says, "you'll need that family here and there." True, true, I think, but not now even though spring has this ram ready to butt and bang and jump chasms. It is time to create and to create I need abundant life force, and to have abundant life force I need to pay attention and to feel and to show up. Here I am again.

Home in Texas

Hello, it's me, I haven't been here for a long, long time (credit to Todd Rundgren). A barnstorming couple of weeks that took me from the snowy 13,000' peaks and upscale but hollow carb infested town of Breckenridge to the sea level debacle of repeating chain(store) DNA that is Houston, TX. And now I'm back in a place so different from the rest of the USA that I am reawakened (again). I'm still staggering from the 16 hour drive from Houston to Taos that spanned Sunday into Monday, but something happened out there in south Texas. There is hill country that rises like green sea swells after the lushness and big muddy rivers of places like Flatonia, Iraan, San Angelo and San Antonio. Into a long, glowlit dusk after San Antone, I drove Montez into a rollercoaster of sandstone ridges and valleys where the air cooled and dried from the swampy oil slick of Houston, and frenzied birdsong echoed in the thick, lowset oaks, magnolias and mulberries. A talkshow station crackled in from Dallas, a woman writer of a Christian book called "Angry Conversations with God" bantered with two hip male Christian hosts about the book and her prideful, reckless foibles on the empty road until she wound her way back to God. It all made sense, what she said, and they had such a self deprecating, knowing hipness that me and my friend who was traveling with me, both of us pagan buddhist animists, were riveted and called them the Hiptians. But, as all good things do, the reception faded into the static scales of the engine's fluctuations and we went quiet as the dusk held on, orange and low flame blue with hints of cranberry and blueberry. And the road rose through cuts in the white sandstone where you could see the bone of the land, the layers of lifetimes piled up in wavy rows. I looked out to the north and the south and breathed into the trees knowing this place, it knowing me. South Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso, Mexico just a little farther south, a place I'd never been before, but I knew it, and it gave me peace, a crack in my heart to release the scent of home. My breathing went downward into my belly and I felt locked in, like I could drive forever. It reminded me of the Bonzai Forest, this place of hills and knobs and chilly, dry air. Darkness finally came springing loose the stars and, low on gas, I pulled off at the historic town of Sonora where I had to drive four miles to find the gas station downtown. It was a sleepy place with the leaves just popping on the locust trees and a pickup in every driveway. There were a few historical markers but I was too tired to read them. Strangely, the clerk in the gasmart had no discernible Texas accent, but then again, this place was nowhere and I knew it, so it wasn't necessarily Texas or the dot showing on the map. Like those mad singing birds filling the giant magnolia in Flatonia hours earlier, I, too, heard the hum of a place in my dreams and it just happened to be called Texas.

Showing Up

Easter morning, April 12th. It is snowing heavily on Taos desert, the mountains shrouded, everything brought in close. I look up into a fall of feathers, it doesn't seem possible that snowflakes can drop thousands of feet, not when a small wind can blow them sideways in a crisscross pattern. It is 7am and the bridge looms over the gorge filled with bouncing snow, its road surface covered with a slick whiteness. It's at once improbable and expected, and as high desert dwellers are ready for anything, and love all weather, there are 70 people huddled under the open air wooden shelter facing the yawning gorge. People are layered up, hats pulled down tight, the dark haired heads of toddlers and infants swimming in giant parka hoods of blue and magenta. Older men greet me with crescent pouches under their eyes, smiling, not old as much as broken in. Some of the women are wearing colorful scarves wrapped around their hair; it reminds me of my childhood in the 70s when more women seemed to wear them, and project mystery and bright eyed destiny in the face of boredom. The reverend Steve Wiard, a Kansan with a broken voiced optimism, a cornfield skipping boy of 60 who loves the red sox and amber beer, paces before the huddled group in his red tartan blanket coat with charcoal crosses in subtle relief on front and back. He is smiling, his salt-and-pepper ponytail spilling and curling out of his blue baseball cap, and telling us that he does not know exactly what happened that day of Christ's resurrection, that it's a mystery. But he knows something happened that turned those people around that day. And he knows that showing up is the key. 70 people in driving snow, 27 degrees, singing songs of peace, and listening to a preacher with a sun faded blue red sox cap whose voice cracks with excitement and wonder and who injects the still unmarred buoyancy of a ten year old who knows anything is possible. You can't see the mountain today but you know it's there. And I don't know what it means, but it feels good to be around people at 7am listening to a guy with whom you'd trade baseball cards and drink beers while watching a ballgame. As he spoke, I looked out to the west to a lone cottonwood standing firm in the snowfall; a single, sturdy tree on a desert at the edge of a massive gorge allowing the snow to collect on it, at the edge of my visibility, nothing behind it but a field of gray while people sing and recite and hug in many colors also on the edge of that wide opening. Something? It reminds me that I read an article last night on David Foster Wallace, a great writer who killed himself months ago at 46. In his last novel, an unfinished work, he wrote of an IRS agent who found himself in the grip of such immense boredom that he thought he'd never recover without hurting himself, or hurling himself away. But he finds a way to stick it out, to be right in it, to use it as practice, and the boredom fades into another state where there is nothing but openness, and he is joyful. He doesn't know what this is, and it doesn't seem like anything but he is spacious. I took that with me as I fell to sleep last night, and I had it with me at the sunrise service in the snow. I don't know what it is, but it exists. Practice, showing up, even if it's mechanical, will lead to joy and peace. Believe me, I know how simple and even trite that sounds. And it doesn't happen right away, and maybe not for a while, but it happens. And I'm not preaching Jesus or any religion, but there's something about showing up. And there's something about being there. I don't know what it is, but it's something.